QUICK NOTES

Spanish company Ferry Group is to invest €42/US$55.2 million in a project for the production of biomass fuel pellets in Bulgaria.
The 3-year project consists of establishing plantations of paulownia trees near the city of Tran. Paulownia is a fast-growing tree used for the commercial production of fuel pellets.
Dnevnik - Feb. 20, 2007.

Tonight at 9pm, BBC Two will be showing a program on geo-engineering techniques to 'save' the planet from global warming. Five of the world's top scientists propose five radical scientific inventions which could stop climate change dead in its tracks. The ideas include: a giant sunshade in space to filter out the sun's rays and help cool us down; forests of artificial trees that would breath in carbon dioxide and stop the green house effect and a fleet futuristic yachts that will shoot salt water into the clouds thickening them and cooling the planet.
BBC News - Feb. 19, 2007.

Archer Daniels Midland, the largest U.S. ethanol producer, is planning to open a biodiesel plant in Indonesia with Wilmar International Ltd. this year and a wholly owned biodiesel plant in Brazil before July, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The Brazil plant is expected to be the nation's largest, the paper said. Worldwide, the company projects a fourfold rise in biodiesel production over the next five years. ADM was not immediately available to comment.
Reuters - Feb. 16, 2007.

Finnish engineering firm Pöyry Oyj has been awarded contracts by San Carlos Bioenergy Inc. to provide services for the first bioethanol plant in the Philippines. The aggregate contract value is EUR 10 million. The plant is to be build in the Province of San Carlos on the north-eastern tip of Negros Island. The plant is expected to deliver 120,000 liters/day of bioethanol and 4 MW of excess power to the grid.
Kauppalehti Online - Feb. 15, 2007.

In order to reduce fuel costs, a Mukono-based flower farm which exports to Europe, is building its own biodiesel plant, based on using Jatropha curcas seeds. It estimates the fuel will cut production costs by up to 20%.
New Vision (Kampala, Uganda) - Feb. 12, 2007.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has decided to use 10% biodiesel in its fleet of public buses. The world's largest city is served by the Toei Bus System, which is used by some 570,000 people daily.
Digital World Tokyo - Feb. 12, 2007.

Fearing lack of electricity supply in South Africa and a price tag on CO2, WSP Group SA is investing in a biomass power plant that will replace coal in the Letaba Citrus juicing plant which is located in Tzaneen.
Mining Weekly - Feb. 8, 2007.

In what it calls an important addition to its global R&D capabilities, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is to build a new bioenergy research center in Hamburg, Germany.
World Grain - Feb. 5, 2007.

EthaBlog's Henrique Oliveira interviews leading Brazilian biofuels consultant Marcelo Coelho who offers insights into the (foreign) investment dynamics in the sector, the history of Brazilian ethanol and the relationship between oil price trends and biofuels.
EthaBlog - Feb. 2, 2007.

The government of Taiwan has announced its renewable energy target: 12% of all energy should come from renewables by 2020. The plan is expected to revitalise Taiwan's agricultural sector and to boost its nascent biomass industry.
China Post - Feb. 2, 2007.

Production at Cantarell, the world's second biggest oil field, declined by 500,000 barrels or 25% last year. This virtual collapse is unfolding much faster than projections from Mexico's state-run oil giant Petroleos Mexicanos.
Wall Street Journal - Jan. 30, 2007.

Dubai-based and AIM listed Teejori Ltd. has entered into an agreement to invest â¬6 million to acquire a 16.7% interest in Bekon, which developed two proprietary technologies enabling dry-fermentation of biomass. Both technologies allow it to design, establish and operate biogas plants in a highly efficient way. Dry-Fermentation offers significant advantages to the existing widely used wet fermentation process of converting biomass to biogas.
Ame Info - Jan. 22, 2007.

Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited is to build a biofuel production plant in the tribal belt of Banswara, Rajasthan, India. The petroleum company has acquired 20,000 hectares of low value land in the district, which it plans to commit to growing jatropha and other biofuel crops. The company's chairman said HPCL was also looking for similar wasteland in the state of Chhattisgarh.
Zee News - Jan. 15, 2007.

The Zimbabwean national police begins planting jatropha for a pilot project that must result in a daily production of 1000 liters of biodiesel.
The Herald (Harare), Via AllAfrica - Jan. 12, 2007.

In order to meet its Kyoto obligations and to cut dependence on oil, Japan has started importing biofuels from Brazil and elsewhere. And even though the country has limited local bioenergy potential, its Agriculture Ministry will begin a search for natural resources, including farm products and their residues, that can be used to make biofuels in Japan. To this end, studies will be conducted at 900 locations nationwide over a three-year period.
The Japan Times - Jan. 12, 2007.

Chrysler's chief economist Van Jolissaint has launched an arrogant attack on "quasi-hysterical Europeans" and their attitudes to global warming, calling the Stern Review 'dubious'. The remarks illustrate the yawning gap between opinions on climate change among Europeans and Americans, but they also strengthen the view that announcements by US car makers and legislators about the development of green vehicles are nothing more than window dressing. Today, the EU announced its comprehensive energy policy for the 21st century, with climate change at the center of it.
BBC News - Jan. 10, 2007.

The new Canadian government is investing $840,000 into BioMatera Inc. a biotech company that develops industrial biopolymers (such as PHA) that have wide-scale applications in the plastics, farmaceutical and cosmetics industries. Plant-based biopolymers such as PHA are biodegradable and renewable.
Government of Canada - Jan. 9, 2007.

Friday, September 01, 2006

We have often hinted at the job-creation potential of the nascent biofuels industry in the developing world. The production of bioenergy is labor-intensive and holds promise for social development in some of the world's poorest regions. But how many jobs are we talking about exactly? And how does the production of bioenergy compare to other energy production technologies when it comes to the generation of employment? Drawing on many previous studies, we made a rough comparison.

The field of 'energy economics' is quite complex as it requires insights about a wide range of scientific disciplines, notably physics, technology, economics and sociology. With this cross-disciplinary approach it is possible to compare different energy technologies and their life-cycle efficiency, their economic potential, or their social impacts.

We did the exercise of comparing and compiling several comprehensive studies that analyse the number of jobs generated by different energy sectors: the fossil fuel sector, the bioenergy sector and the sector of non-biomass related renewables. The results [table 1] are very rough, but nonetheless indicative of the potential.

Our method to arrive at these results consisted of taking a base methodology (found in a majority of the studies) and converting the results of studies that used different approaches to the base methodology. The final results were expressed in the number of direct full-time jobs (245 workdays of 8 hours per year) generated per megawatt-hour of electricity delivered or per gigajoule of usable energy (either in liquid, gaseous or solid form). For the sake of clarity, we brought the results back to one denominator, namely "jobs generated per thousand barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) produced". The table can thus be read as follows: for each 1000 barrels of oil produced, 0.07 jobs are created; when you produce the same amount of energy in the form of ethanol based on sugarcane as a feedstock that is harvested manually, you create around 9 full-time jobs; the process of manufacturing, installing and operating wind turbines that generate a similar amount of useable energy, yields slightly less than one tenth of a full-time job.

Studies focusing on direct jobs onlyWe only compiled the number of 'direct jobs' generated. This excludes both 'indirect' and 'induced' jobs, as they are often found in 'input-output' (I-O) economic models. I-O models examine economic relationships in state and national economies, and determine the impact of a certain amount of renewable energy development on jobs and revenues. But I-O models do not break down renewable energy jobs by specific tasks, as several of the studies we used, do. This makes it easier to delineate between direct, indirect and induced jobs.But the division remains largely arbitrary. For example, for bioenergy we used studies that only took into account the 'agricultural' process per se (planting, fertilizing, weeding/pruning, harvesting), the logistical chain for transporting and storing the harvested biomass, and the final conversion into useable energy (either as a liquid fuel or as biomass-for-electricity or both). We left out the number of jobs generated in the manufacture, installation, operation and maintenance of conversion plants (e.g. sugar mills or ethanol production plants), nor in those generated by co-product streams, even though these offer a considerable amount of jobs (for example, we left out the jobs generated by the production, treatment, distribution and sales of glycerine, an important by-product of biodiesel production). The problem is that for other technologies (such as photovoltaics), the chain of added jobs looks entirely different, making detailed comparisons difficult.Socalled 'induced' jobs were left out of the compilation as well. These are jobs that are created when those who are (in)directly employed in the sector (e.g. biomass harvesters) boost a local economy which leads to more employment in entirely unrelated sectors.Nonetheless, it was possible to create a rough comparison, based on looking at the methodologies used by the studies, which allowed us to divide the estimates into classes (direct, indirect and induced jobs), and comparing those.

Biomass and its many possible uses

"Biomass" can be converted into usable energy via many different processes and technologies. It can be turned into liquid fuels for transport, or into gaseous and solid fuels for the generation of electricity. Moreover, this conversion yields many different by-products that have markets of their own, and for which new markets are being developed (e.g. glycerine from the production of biodiesel has just entered the poultry feed market as a high value feed). In the future, "biomass" will be the feedstock for integrated "biorefineries" that yield much more than only fuels or power. For the time being, though, we did not take the number of jobs generated in these new markets for biofuel by-products into account.

Labor productivity for biomass energy productionA compilation of studies of labor productivity for biomass energy production in the developing world (Stockholm Environment Institute, 2001).

The studies we usedThe following is the list of existing studies that estimate the number of jobs generated in different energy sectors. Even though most of this research shows surprisingly consistent results, there obviously are differences accross studies, depending on the number of samples used by the researchers, the methodology and the time at which the research was carried out. The latter is an important factor, since productivity increases over time, often resulting in fewer jobs for a particular sector over a particular period of time. This is most obvious in the coal sector, which has seen a steadily increasing production of coal over the last decades, but a serious decline in employment. Notwithstanding these differences in results, the studies did allow us to compile rough estimates. We used the following reports, which must be seen as 'meta-studies', because their results are based on comparing and compiling prior research:

Added to this, we asked several major biofuel companies active in the developing world to estimate how many jobs their projects yield, on a per hectare and 'per joule' basis. We then compared those estimates to independent research and calculated a rough average.We received personal communications from (1) a major international biofuel production company involved in jatropha plantations in the South (South Africa, India, Philippines), (2) from a major oil palm plantation company active in Central-Africa and (3) from a company with biofuel production activities (using a grass species for biomass) in the Philippines. We wish to thank these companies for their participation.

In a later article, we will be looking at what this comparison really means. Because things are more complex than they look. Yes, bioenergy promises to bring many jobs to places where unemployment is a problem. But from the results we can also conclude that for some biofuels labor is the single most important cost factor in the production process, meaning that you need a pool of "cheap labor" in order to keep these fuels competitive. Some energy crops need so much of this cheap labor, that one can begin to wonder where social development ends, and exploitation begins. We will focus on these questions at a later time.

CROP NEWS

Cassava has one of the highest rates of CO2 fixation and sucrose synthesis for any C3 plant. With this in mind, researchers from Ohio State University develop transgenic cassava with starch yields up 2.6 times higher than normal plants by increasing the sink strength for carbohydrate in the crop. This means cassava makes for a 'super crop' when it comes to both CO2 fixation and carbohydrate production, i.e. sugars, the feedstock for ethanol - Plant Biotechnology Journal - Volume 4/Issue 4 - July 2006

Brazilian state of Acre intends to make cattle ranchers reforest land which they have cleared for grazing. The sustainable forestry policy is based on replanting economic tree crops such as mahogany, acai, Brazil nut and palms - BBCNews Sept. 27, 2006

Australian scientists are conducting a 'time-machine' experiment to see how eucalyptus trees cope with increased levels of CO2 and global warming. - University of Western Sydney Aug. 28, 2006

Bamboo planting can slow deforestation, scientists from the International Center for Research in Agroforestry in Nairobi, Kenya, say. Bamboo rapidly becoming economically beneficial crop with large potential for energy, bioremediation, and afforestation - Chosun (S.Korea) Aug. 30, 2006

"The beauty of miscanthus is that you only have to sow it once...Because of the way it grows, there is no need for fertilisers or chemicals", an English entrepreneur talks about his experience with Miscanthus as an energy crop - Grantham Today Aug. 8, 2006